OPC UA Book

The first OPC Unified Architecture Book, written by Wolfgang Mahnke, Stefan-Helmut Leitner and Matthias Damm one of the co-founders of ascolab.

News

Most sophisticated Server on the Marked

Erlangen, Karlsruhe May 03, 2010 - Siemens released their new, more sophisticated OPC UA Server. The communication product SIMATIC NET (CD 2010) already had OPC UA capabilities of the Data Access profile, but now was enhanced with Alarms & Conditions. Together with ascolab GmbH this UA Server was developed, it is the first OPC UA Server on the marked that supports not only Data Access but also Alarms & Conditions and Method Calls. In addition the performance was dramatically increased. First measurements showed that this new OPC Server reached locally the same speed than the old classic OPC Server, but remotely OPC UA reached twice the speed of DCOM. The new SIMATIC NET OPC UA Server is available for S7-protocol and PNIO-protocol. The ascolab GmbH assisted the development phase and the system testing of this new server, making it the leading edge of UA technology on the marked.
 

PLCopen OPC UA WorkingGroup

Erlangen, May 2010. ascolab is a founding member of the OPC UA for IEC61131 (PLCopen) working group and editor of the companion specification since 2008. ascolab's technical experts pushed forward the joined working group of OPC Foundation and PLCopen. The goal was to define a companion specification for standardized OPC UA type mapping for PLC objects such as Functionblocks. All IEC 61131 programmed PLCs will take advantage of this standardized mapping. Their dedicated OPC UA Servers will represent the data in an identical namespace. SCADA and HMI systems can now rely on standardized object represenation and engineering effort is reduced to a minimum. The companion specification was released in 2010. The group is now working on an enhancement to introduce Server-Server communication between PLCs of different manufacturers.
 

OPC UA - running on QNX

Erlangen, August 22, 2009 - The ascolab GmbH ported the OPC UA ANSI C Stack to new embedded operating system. Together with QNX Software Systems the OPC UA Server was ported and tested on the new QNX Neutrino V6.4.1 running on an Intel Atom processor. The QNX real time operating system natively supports a full set of SSL functions. This made porting much easier and directly enables the OPC UA Server for encryption and authentication. Toolchain files including cross compiler settings were adapted and the new OPC UA Software Development Kit (SDK) for QNX will be available for evaluation download soon. Unified Automation GmbH
   

Wireshark - OPC UA Protocol Diagnostics

Erlangen, Germany - April 07, 2009 . ascolab updated the source code of the OPC UA Wireshark Plugin to comply with the latest OPC UA Specification. Using this plugin you can decode and analyze the OPC UA TCP-Binary protocol directly on the wire. The code will be integrated into the next release of Wireshark which will be available within the next 4 to 8 weeks. For more information please click here . For more information on Wireshark visit www.wireshark.org
 

IOP - OPC UA Products under Test

Boca Raton, Florida - March 2-6, 2009. The ascolab GmbH participates in the Interoperability (IOP) Workshop in Boca Raton, Florida. As developer of the new Unified Architecture certification software (UA-CTT) ascolab attends with the newest prototype and presented to a selected audience. The new test software will become available for members soon. During this five day event up to 13 vendors already tested new OPC UA products against each other. The results of this tests are stored in a database and published in the product catalog on the OPC Foundation web site (www.opcfoundation.org).
   

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